Computing devices have made significant contributions toward the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous devices, such as personal computers, servers, hand-held devices, distributed computer systems, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems, have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating data in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment.
Computing device-readable memory is usually an important component of a number of computing devices. Computing device-readable memories typically store information utilized by a system in performance of a number of different tasks. Other components of a system typically request access to memory in order to retrieve (e.g., “read”) information from and store (e.g., “write”) information in the memory. Different types of memories (e.g., mass storage, main memory, removable memory and the like) and/or memory “spaces” (e.g., virtual, physical) can be utilized to support information storage.
Different types of computing device-readable memory can potentially offer different features, such as storage capacity and access speed. Traditionally, memories that have relatively large storage capacity have relatively slow access speeds. Memories that have relatively fast access speeds, in contrast, typically have relatively small storage capacities. For example, primary memories (e.g., main memory) are relatively fast compared to secondary memories (e.g., mass storage memory) but typically store less information. In view of the tradeoffs a number of systems transfer chunks of information between relatively fast small memories and relatively slow bulk memories to attempt to optimize speed and capacity. As a result, the system may virtualize the physical memory to give each application the view that they have a large contiguous memory. The memory management unit (MMU) manages the mappings that virtualize the memory space.
Another technique for optimizing performance in computing devices is to utilize virtual and physical address spaces. Virtual address space allows applications to utilize as much memory as needed without regard to the true size of physical memory or the memory utilization of other applications. The application retrieves and stores instructions and data utilizing virtual addresses, and the memory system retrieves and stores instruction and data in physical memory using physical addresses to access the true physical memory. Accordingly, translation between the virtual memory space addressing and physical memory space addressing is performed by the computing system. As a result, applications and data may be moved within memory and between different types of memory without having to recode applications.
Although the above techniques are currently utilized, the continued advancement of computing devices results in a continuous need for ever increasing memory system performance. Therefore, there is a continuing need for memory management techniques that provide additional optimization.